A ‘Battle of the Sexes’ Rages On, More Than 4 Decades Later

Los Angeles — As the trumpets struck up a brassy fanfare, Emma Stone — perched on a pink feather-bedecked golden litter held aloft by a retinue of bare-chested men — made her entrance into a cavernous arena here.

Awaiting her on this early May morning last year was an uncanny recreation of a scene that unfolded nearly 45 years earlier at the Houston Astrodome, in front of an audience of more than 30,000 (including Glen Campbell and Salvador Dalí) and another 50 million Americans watching at home.

“The Battle of the Sexes,” as the made-for-television spectacle was billed, was the brainchild of Bobby Riggs, the 55-year-old former tennis star who had enthusiastically (and impishly) embraced his inner chauvinist pig and challenged Billie Jean King, the 29-year-old, two-time Wimbledon champion and founder of the recently formed women’s professional tennis tour, to a $100,000, winner-take-all match.

On that evening in September 1973, after being delivered courtside in a gilded rickshaw pulled by women wearing “Sugar Daddy” T-shirts, Riggs handed Ms. King an oversized lollipop. In return, Ms. King gave him a squealing piglet.

When the filmmakers behind “Battle of the Sexes” started work on the movie — to be released on Sept. 22, with Ms. Stone playing Ms. King and Steve Carell as Riggs — they thought the media circus from 1973 it depicts would be unfathomable today. The issues the movie would entertainingly raise — society’s deep-seated chauvinism, the gender pay gap — would still have resonance, but not too much.

That, however, was before the director of a prestigious tennis tournament declared that professional women players “ride on the coattails of the men”; John McEnroe sparked a social media firestorm by claiming that Serena Williams would rank 700th if she played on the men’s circuit; and the boorish behavior toward women of the Republican presidential candidate became a lighting rod in a nasty campaign.

“Well, I hoped the movie would reignite the debate,” said the film’s screenwriter, Simon Beaufoy. “But since we started making it, the debate has reignited itself.”

Mr. Beaufoy, an Oscar winner for writing “Slumdog Millionaire,” was recruited to the project by two longtime collaborators, the director Danny Boyle and the producer Christian Colson. Mr. Boyle (“127 Hours,” “Trainspotting”) was set to direct but had to withdraw from directing when the sequel to “Trainspotting” suddenly came together with a tight window to get it made. (He remains a producer.)

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Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in 1973.CreditAnthony Camerano/Associated Press

The studio, Fox Searchlight, then turned to Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the husband-and-wife team behind “Little Miss Sunshine,” a hit for the studio in 2006. Their most significant tweak to the script: They made Ms. King’s personal life a bigger part of the movie. Ms. King, who came out in the 1980s and is now a widely admired advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. groups, was in 1973 married to a man and only beginning to grapple with her sexuality, falling for a female hair stylist.

“It really did happen this way, where Billie Jean began her first affair with a woman at a time when she one of the most famous women in America, if not the world,” Mr. Dayton said. “So that seemed like an important story to tell. And at the same time, she was fighting this very public battle for equality.”

Ms. Faris chimed in: “She was starting the Women’s Tennis Association. She had so much at stake.”

Mr. Dayton finished the thought: “She was having this relationship that, if found out, could be a calamity for her career in tennis and her sponsorships and just her general image.”

Ms. King, the first woman ever named sportsperson of the year by Sports Illustrated (in 1972), had first rebuffed Riggs’s entreaties for the showdown, unwilling to be party to such a gimmicky spectacle when she was trying to get the women’s tour off the ground. But after he easily dispatched the Australian tennis star Margaret Court in May of 1973, she changed her mind.

“I knew in my heart of hearts that if she lost, I was going to play him,” Ms. King, now 73, said. “I knew that it would touch the hearts of millions of people before the match, and they would all be talking about it, because I knew it was about social change.”

More than the public acceptance of professional women’s tennis was at stake. Title IX, landmark federal legislation that prohibited sex discrimination in programs that received federal aid, had been enacted the year before. And at a time when women couldn’t obtain a credit card without a man’s signature, Ms. King feared it could be weakened. Letting the chauvinists chortle over Riggs’s victories would not help in the battle for public opinion.

Ms. King won the best-of-five match in straight sets.

But while appalled at the sexism she and other women faced, she understood that the stunt was mostly a professional lark for Riggs. (She remained friends with him until his death in 1995.) Lines like “I’ll put Billie Jean King and all the other Women’s Libbers back where they belong — in the kitchen and the bedroom” — were part of Riggs’s desperate desire to be part of the action. At Wimbledon in 1939 Riggs won in singles, doubles and mixed doubles competition. He was considered one of the best tennis players of his time, and his competitive streak didn’t end when his career did.

Riggs was obsessed with the hustle. He would bet on anything, including playing an opponent while holding the leashes of two dogs. While attending therapy in a bid to curtail his gambling addiction and save his marriage, he played — and beat — his therapist in poker.

Mr. Carell, who was 11 during the actual Battle of the Sexes, said he took pains to make sure Riggs didn’t look like a clown. “I remember, even at that age, knowing that Bobby Riggs was putting everybody on, and that that was part of his charm,” he said.

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Mr. Carell and Ms. Stone in “Battle of the Sexes.”Credit20th Century Fox

Events of the past 18 months, however, have given the film a sharper edge than it otherwise may have wielded.

In March of 2016, Raymond Moore, the director of the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif., told the news media on the final Sunday of that tournament that “If I was a lady player, I’d go down every night on my knees and thank God that Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal were born, because they have really carried this sport.”

Under pressure, Mr. Moore stepped down from his position the next day.

Earlier this year, during an interview on NPR, Mr. McEnroe was asked why he qualified his praise of Serena Williams as one of the best female players in the world. His response that she would be ill matched playing against even one of the lowest-ranked men fueled outrage that he was belittling her talents.

For Ms. Stone and the filmmakers, such hypothetical scenarios are beside the point.

“Billie Jean’s argument, and the argument that’s in the movie, was never that female tennis players are better than the men,” Ms. Stone said. “It was that we get butts in seats equally. And that’s her argument in the tennis world and that overall in our country and of course worldwide. If someone is doing the same job they deserve the same pay. That’s not even talking about the Hollywood problem, it’s just a fact of the matter across our country.”

(Ms. Stone was reticent about elaborating on recent comments she made in Out magazine, in which she said “I’ve needed my male co-stars to take a pay cut so that I may have parity with them.” Mr. Carell said that was not an issue on “Battle of the Sexes,” adding that he thought there was “complete equity in this.”)

Since the election of Donald J. Trump, however, advocates for gender equity worry that advances could be stalled. And some of the language used by Mr. Trump about women — whether bantering with Billy Bush during an “Access Hollywood” taping in 2005 or insinuating that Megyn Kelly asked him forceful debate questions because she was menstruating — has markedly changed how audiences at test screenings have reacted, according to the directors.

“It was much more charged after the election, and people were just more sensitized to the way women were being talked about and treated,” Ms. Faris said.

“These things are hard fought,” Ms. Faris added, referring to social changes like gender equity. “They take a long time and they’re never really won. We didn’t want to end the movie with, And look how far they’ve come.”

Current events have made sure of that.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR62 of the New York edition with the headline: A ‘Battle of the Sexes’ Rages On. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe